environment Politics: denialists idiots media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 11, Day 13: POW! ZAP! SPLAT!
The Kansas City Star asks, “Post-Sandy and post-election, will political taboo on climate change be lifted?” Gee, what do you think?
Even before President Barack Obama took the stage for his victory speech Tuesday night, environmentalists were laying out their expectations for his second term: act on climate change, whether it’s through sweeping legislative action, regulatory rules or decisions like blocking the Keystone XL pipeline.
Just minutes after the race was called Tuesday, the group 350.org announced a Keystone XL protest on Nov. 18. Young climate activists who joined the celebration outside the White House held up a sign saying “Sandy Demands Climate Action Now,” a reference to the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy.
One line in Obama’s victory speech gave the green groups hope that he might act.
“We want our children to live in an America that isn’t burdened by debt, that isn’t weakened by inequality, that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet,” the president said.
But taking action to achieve those goals isn’t going to be easy. While more than a dozen legislators targeted by environmental groups for their votes on clean energy and climate change bills were defeated in the election, neither chamber switched parties. With the status quo likely to continue in Congress, environmental groups say they’ll pressure the White House to continue, or amplify, its work of the last four years.
We’ve got a lot of work ahead. Sent November 11:
The mere existence of a “political taboo” on discussion of climate change is a shameful indictment of our news media and our systems of governance. Because of the atmosphere of hyper-partisanship artificially generated over the last several decades by conservative commentators and politicians, rational discussion has been all but impossible either in the halls of Congress or on our national news networks. Perhaps the nationwide rejection of conservative ideology in the recent election will bring this paralysis to an end; a recent survey reveals that more than two-thirds of Americans believe global warming poses a serious threat to our future.
It’s time for conservative legislators to stop interfering with principled policies designed to address the accelerating greenhouse effect and its consequences. Simple cost-benefit calculations reveal that, when it comes to the climate crisis, a billion spent in prevention and mitigation is worth a trillion spent in after-the-fact cleanup and repair.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: causation denialists extreme weather media irresponsibility Storms
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 11, Day 12: O-Bla-Di, O-Bla-Da
The Athens Banner-Herald (GA) runs a column by one Eugene Linden, who is trying to hell people something:
Even as Sandy underwent its bizarre metamorphosis from hurricane to winter storm, the question arose in many inquiring minds (at least those not beholden to a solemn oath of climate-change denial): Was this historic storm a symptom of global warming? Climate science has two ready answers: Absolutely! And, of course not!
On the one hand, a warming globe makes megastorms more probable, while on the other, it is impossible to pin a global warming sticker on Sandy because the circumstances that turned it into a monster could have been mere coincidence.
There is, however, another way of looking at Sandy that might resolve this debate, and also help frame what we really should be worried about when it comes to global warming: An infrastructure created to defend against historical measures of worst-case natural threats was completely overpowered by this storm.
New York City’s defenses were inadequate, and coastal defenses failed over a swath of hundreds of miles. Around the nation, such mismatches have been repeated ever more frequently in recent years.
This summer, barge owners discovered that dredging in the Mississippi River, predicated on the history of the river’s ups and downs, left it too shallow for commercial traffic because of the intense Midwestern drought. And, famously, levees in New Orleans that were largely through the process of being improved even as Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005 were still breached in 50 places. Then, seven years to the day after Katrina struck, Plaquemines Parish was drowned by Hurricane Isaac in flooding residents described as worse than Katrina’s.
Will the American public wake up? Details at eleven. Sent November 10:
The relationship between global climate change and extreme weather events like Superstorm Sandy, or the drought that devastated America’s corn belt this summer cannot be understood without recognizing the big difference between specific causation and systemic causation. A specific rock broke a specific window; a specific iceberg collided with the Titanic; a specific O-ring failed on the Challenger. Conversely, a metastatic lung tumor cannot be traced back to a single cigarette, and the catastrophic weather that hammered America’s East coast cannot be attributed unambiguously to the accelerating greenhouse effect. But does this mean that smoking is safe, or that our emissions of carbon dioxide are without effect on the planet’s weather systems? In a word, no.
By conflating these two different kinds of cause, our media has abdicated its responsibility to the citizenry it is supposed to serve. If we as a nation (indeed, as a species) are to survive and prosper in the coming centuries, we can no longer afford ignorance on matters of basic science. It is time for all of us to face the facts.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists U.S. Chamber of Commerce
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 11, Day 11: We Have Always Been At War With Eastasia.
The Chillicothe Times-Bulletin (IN) has a good column by a chap named Bill Knight, who calls out the deniers nicely:
However, deniers and apologists remain bold. If they’re ostriches hiding heads in sand, they’re powerful birds. Fox News still tries to legitimize those who deny the evidence, (recently airing a British tabloid’s story based on a report by a U.K. agency — which criticized the broadcast as misleading). Besides disinformation, the most disturbing reaction has been from corporations and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson suggests that humans will just adapt to changed climate, saying, “Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around — we’ll adapt to that.”
The Chamber in a brief filed with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency urged officials not to regulate carbon: “Should the world’s scientists turn out to be right and the planet heats up,” the Chamber wrote, “populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological and technological adaptations.”
More sensible insights come from environmentalist and journalist Bill McKibben, who recently warned about Earth facing three crucial numbers: 2 degrees Celsius (or 3.6 Fahrenheit), the maximum increase in global temperatures that the planet can tolerate; 565 gigatons (a gigaton is 1 billion metric tons), the most carbon dioxide that can be released into the air by midcentury and remain below that 2-degree mark; and 2,795 gigatons, the amount of proven reserves of coal, oil and gas available for burning.
Rupert Murdoch and all those in his sphere of influence are doing irreparable damage to our collective future. Sent November 9:
Conservative groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce use a lot of doublespeak when they try to explain away the frightening facts of the climate crisis. What on Earth do they mean when they assert that humanity can adjust to a radically transformed climate “via a range of behavioral, physiological and technological adaptations”?
“Behavioral adaptations” like car-pooling or recycling are worthy activities, to be sure, but they’re inadequate coping strategies for a world that’s drastically hotter and racked by catastrophic weather events. Is the Chamber actually just telling us to run for the hills? And how will “technological adaptations” like electric cars or wind turbines protect us against extreme droughts and superstorms? “Physiological adaptation” is easy to understand. It’s an Orwellian euphemism for dying in large numbers.
If our species is to prosper in the coming centuries, we must stop denying and distorting the facts of the climate emergency.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists media irresponsibility scientific consensus
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 11, Day 10: Got To Get You Into My Life
Eugene Robinson of the WaPo, printed here in the Richmond, Indiana, Palladium-Item:
WASHINGTON — We’ve had two once-in-a-century storms within the span of a decade. Hurricane Sandy seems likely to be the second-costliest storm in U.S. history, behind Hurricane Katrina. Lower Manhattan is struggling to recover from an unprecedented flood and the New Jersey coast is smashed beyond recognition.
Will we finally get the message?
How, at this point, can anyone deny the scientific consensus about climate change? The traditional dodge — that no one weather event can definitively be attributed to global warming — doesn’t work anymore. If something looks, walks and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. Especially if the waterfowl in question is floating through your living room.
For decades now, researchers have been telling us that one of the effects of climate change would be to make the weather more volatile and violent. Well, here we are.
And here we will remain, perhaps for the rest of our lives. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when humans began burning fossil fuels in earnest, the concentration of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by an incredible 40 percent. We have altered the composition of the air.
Nate Silver:Dick Morris — James Hansen:Willie Soon. Reality rox:
Now that the post-election period of reflection has arrived, we can begin to understand how number-crunchers like the New York Times’ Nate Silver got it right, while conservative pundits without exception got it so wrong. By relying exclusively on data that confirmed their own preconceptions, the prognosticators of the right wing built a bubble of denial that was finally shattered by a flood of real, irrefutable, data — votes. The statisticians were right all along.
And what if those math-and-science types are also right on climate change? If the research and analyses of respected climatologists like James Hansen and Michael Mann weren’t part of a liberal hoax after all? Why, that would mean that the GOP’s reality-rejection strategy has cost America (and the world) over twelve years of preparation and mitigation — years we’ll never get back. When it comes to climate change, it’s time for conservatives to face the facts — and the future.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists Hurricane Sandy media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism Storms
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 11, Day 7: Who Won The War?
The Hartford Courant is one among many outlets seizing upon the hurricane as an opportunity to advocate responsible policies on climate change. Not bad:
Let Hurricane Sandy be our tipping point toward a better America.
First, we’re all in this together. As the wind strengthened and the hurricane neared, the political negativity and hostility waned. There’s nothing like a common adversary to unite us, even a benign atmospheric one. It wasn’t just that Sandy wreaked havoc on campaign plans. It’s that both presidential candidates began to act more like governors than ideological opponents beholden to a spectrum of groups.
Watching them gave me more faith in America’s potential than all the bickering I’ve been forced to hear. Apparently, when push comes to shove, we can work together because we must.
Second, a picture is worth a thousand words. The satellite images showed a white, counterclockwise pinwheel of clouds just like every other hurricane I’ve seen — except for its size. With what the pundits are calling a wingspan a thousand miles across, Sandy was two to three times larger than typical. Keep in mind that one of the most robust predictions of climate change theory is that extreme events will be more powerful, whether this unprecedented storm or last summer’s unprecedented drought.
Let this pinwheel become a pinup to move us toward a saner, safer, smarter future. A cultural shift similar to what I remember happening after earthlings got a chance to see our spherical, cloud-gauzed, green-swathed living planet from space. I refer to the famous “Earthrise” photo taken from the moon during the Apollo 11 landing in July 1969. It helped launch the most potent phase of the American environmental movement, which centered on pollution and wilderness. Let the new pinup energize a third phase already underway, one focused on a sane energy policy and policy adaptations to the good and bad things of climate change.
We can hope. They haven’t taken that away from us, yet. Sent November 1:
Mother Nature has been sending us increasingly urgent messages for quite a few years now, as the burgeoning greenhouse effect has raised atmospheric temperatures steadily and inexorably. Yet climate change has remained on the to-ignore list for almost every single politician in America. This is partially because of the disproportionate influence of fossil fuel money on our political and legislative systems, partially because the subject has been so heavily politicized by (mostly) Republican lawmakers and commentators, and partially because our media is astonishingly incompetent at addressing subjects of any complexity whatsoever. Well, that may have ended a few days ago. In Hurricane Sandy, many Americans got a chance to see the consequences of all those carbon dioxide emissions, up close and personal.
A heart attack can catalyze the transformation of a single lifestyle. Will Sandy’s devastating waves catalyze an analogous change in American society — a step away from feverish consumerism and towards responsible stewardship of our planet? And will our media and politicians heed the call?
In the aftermath of 9/11, President Bush told Americans to go shopping. Eleven years later, perhaps we need to hear a different message.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists hurricane media irresponsibility rising sea levels Storms
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 11, Day 5: Turn Off Your Mind, Relax And Float Downstream…
The San Jose Mercury News wonders:
The debate over global warming has often turned at key points after major weather events. After a presidential campaign in which neither candidate said much on the issue, could Hurricane Sandy put it back in the spotlight?
Sure. News at 11. Sent October 30:
Hurricane Sandy could well do for climate-change awareness what a major celebrity death did for AIDS or Alzheimer’s disease. That is, make the accelerating greenhouse effect and its consequences a focus of the kind of media attention normally reserved for celebrity scandals or TV season premieres.
That’s good news and bad news. It’s good news because climate change is overwhelmingly the single most significant issue affecting our country’s future and the lives of our descendants. Our collective lack of attention has set us back several decades when it comes to addressing the threat — so any coverage is better than none.
It’s bad news because what we need from the media is an intelligent discussion of a complex subject. If climate change is treated with the breathless superficiality that characterizes contemporary news coverage, our citizenry, and our politicians, will never fully understand why action is essential. Let’s get serious. Now.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists media irresponsibility scientific consensus Storms
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 11, Day 4: I Know You Are, But What Am I?
The L.A. Times wonders whether Hurricane Sandy is possibly related to, you know, that climate change thingy?
As Hurricane Sandy bears down on the Eastern seaboard — laden with predictions of drenching rains, fierce winds, snow and extensive damage — some scientists are pointing out ways that climate change might be influencing hurricanes.
No single weather event, be it drought, snowfall or hurricane, is caused by climate change, climatologists say. Rather, climate change amplifies the intensity or duration of extreme weather, akin to “putting hurricanes on steroids,” writes Amanda Staudt, a climate scientist for the National Wildlife Federation, an environmental advocacy group.
“The answer to the oft-asked question of whether an event is caused by climate change is that it is the wrong question,” writes Kevin E. Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. “All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be.”
Hurricane Sandy poses several threats. Vast and slow-moving, it is expected to pour drenching rains and unleash powerful winds in the Northeast over a protracted period, perhaps several days.
No way they’re going to print this one. Sent October 28:
Despite sober and careful analyses from climatologists pointing out that a heating atmosphere makes extreme storms and anomalous weather increasingly likely, the conservative voices in politics and the media are certain to tell us that Sandy is an “isolated incident,” which cannot be definitively attributed to the accelerating greenhouse effect — even when specific triggering factors (such as a warming ocean) are obviously present.
Indeed. And as those same pundits and politicians hasten to reassure us, the steady drumbeat of right-wing hate on talk radio has nothing to do with the frequent outbursts of violence from the ultra-conservative fringe. Each gun-toting lunatic is an “isolated incident” which cannot be definitively attributed to the accelerating atmosphere of apocalyptic hatred generated by shock jocks and their enablers — even when specific triggering factors (such as a shelf of books by those same polarizing figures) are obviously present.
No connection. None at all.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment Politics: assholes denialists Education idiots scientific consensus
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 11, Day 3: Don’t Think Of An Elephant!
Those crazy Kansans are at it again:
Kansas State Board of Education races this year are shadowed by an emerging conflict over science standards for public schools — and it’s not all about evolution.
Climate change is emerging as a potential political flashpoint in Kansas and possibly 25 other states working with the National Research Council on common standards. If adopted, the guidelines could encourage public schools to spend far more time teaching students about the Earth’s climate and how human activity affects it.
Kansas state school board candidates are used to questions about the state’s science standards because of past debates about how evolution should be taught, but the possibility of a similar debate about climate change is a new twist as the Nov. 6 election approaches. Five of the board’s 10 seats are on the ballot, and three races are contested.
The winners, along with the hold-over board members, are expected to vote on new science standards early next year. At least a few conservative Republicans in Kansas are wary of what the standards will say about climate change amid support from educators and scientists for addressing the topic more thoroughly than in the past.
“When you’re looking at 100 scientists, you’ve got 90-some, high 90s, that have no question about climate change, and so for them, they have no problem with that being in,” said John Richard Schrock, a veteran biology professor at Emporia State University.
But, he acknowledged, to others, “It looks political.”
We are sooooooo fucked. Sent October 27:
As the East coast prepares for an oncoming superstorm, and the corn belt struggles to recover from a season of devastating drought, it beggars belief that climate-change denialist positions are under serious consideration for inclusion in Kansas’ science curricula. If, as the Emporia biology professor notes, the subject “looks political,” that’s not because it’s under any serious scientific dispute, but because a group of cynical, profit-hungry opportunists have exploited a complacent and complaisant media to push the spurious notion that there still remains any meaningful dispute about the existence, causes and genuine dangers presented by climate change.
Conservatives’ conflation of scientific methodology with religious doctrine is revealing. For these folk, the notion of a gradually-strengthening scientific consensus supported by empirical evidence and the logical analysis of data is simply another dogma. Americans should reject such thinking as more appropriate to an earlier, and far more barbaric, chapter in human history.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists media irresponsibility
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 11, Day 1: Make Me Wanna Holler…
The Christian Science Monitor wonders why nobody wonders why nobody wonders why nobody wonders why:
Energy and green energy were hot topics during the presidential debates, but climate change didn’t come up once. The candidates may be avoiding the issue because voters don’t want to hear a difficult message.
In four years, climate change has gone from the elephant that blind men are trying to describe to the elephant in the room.
No one wants to talk about it. With a few exceptions, voters don’t ask. And presidential candidates don’t tell.
Now that the 2012 presidential debates are over, commentators have begun to take notice. Not once during the three presidential encounters or the single vice-presidential debate did the subject come up.
“National elections should be a time when our nation considers the great challenges and opportunities the next President will face,” opines the website ClimateSilence.org, a project of Forecast the Facts and Friends of the Earth Action aimed at pushing the issue into campaigns. “But the climate conversation of 2012 has been defined by a deafening silence.”
Sheesh. Sent October 25:
For a major news outlet to assert that “voters don’t want to hear a difficult message” as an explanation for the presidential candidates’ aversion to discussion of climate change is disingenuous. While nobody likes getting bad news, it is (or should be) the responsibility of professional journalists to help the general population understand difficult or complex subjects. This is crucial when the problem is exacerbated by delay, as in the case of the greenhouse effect and its consequences.
Over the past several decades, in fact, our print and broadcast media have shown extraordinary reluctance to cover environmental issues in a scientifically responsible way. Instead we’re offered a neutralized version of the truth, in which scientific findings are falsely equated with predictable denialist tropes. When reporters and analysts tell us that “the public doesn’t care about climate change,” they’re really saying that they don’t want to tackle the subject.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Al Gore denialists idiots media irresponsibility
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 10, Day 26: I Wouldn’t Have Smoked In Bed If We Hadn’t Installed Those Smoke Detectors!
Not that this is news or anything, but the New York Times’ David Brooks is an utter idiot:
The period around 2003 was the golden spring of green technology. John McCain and Joe Lieberman introduced a bipartisan bill to curb global warming. I got my first ride in a Prius from a conservative foreign policy hawk who said that these new technologies were going to help us end our dependence on Middle Eastern despots. You’d go to Silicon Valley and all the venture capitalists, it seemed, were rushing into clean tech.
From that date on the story begins to get a little sadder.
Al Gore released his movie “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006. The global warming issue became associated with the highly partisan former vice president. Gore mobilized liberals, but, once he became the global warming spokesman, no Republican could stand shoulder to shoulder with him and survive. Any slim chance of building a bipartisan national consensus was gone.
Then, in 2008, Barack Obama seized upon green technology and decided to make it the centerpiece of his jobs program. During his presidential campaign he promised to create five million green tech jobs. Renewable energy has many virtues, but it is not a jobs program. Obama’s stimulus package set aside $90 billion for renewable energy loans and grants, but the number of actual jobs created has been small. Articles began to appear in the press of green technology grants that were costing $2 million per job created. The program began to look like a wasteful disappointment.
Federal subsidies also created a network of green tech corporations hoping to benefit from taxpayer dollars. One of the players in this network was, again, Al Gore. As Carol Leonnig reported in The Washington Post last week, Gore left public office in 2001 worth less than $2 million. Today his wealth is estimated to be around $100 million.
I’m going to stop doing facepalms and start doing headbricks, I swear. Sent October 19:
As the evidence accumulates all around us, and the scientific consensus reaches near unanimity, we’re going to hear more conservatives acknowledge the reality of global climate change. But because it involves admitting error, this process will involve them in a lot of blame-shifting, equivocating, and historical revisionism. David Brooks offers us a preview of what this will look in his attempt to hold Al Gore responsible for the American epidemic of climate-change denial.
Apparently Mr. Gore couldn’t attract conservative support because he was too…shrill? Too popular among hippies? Too right, too soon? Mr. Brooks blithely ignores both the GOP’s decades-long antipathy to science and their pathological hyper-partisanship in his eagerness to avoid responsibility for what his own ideological allies have wrought. Now that climate change itself is irrefutable, the locus of denial has shifted: Republicans would have done something about climate change, but those pesky environmentalists were in the way.
Warren Senders